If we were a different type of company and this was a different type of weblog, this blog post would be about how we’d successfully built a digital-analogue platform and now we’re moving on to the next stage – building (and helping you build) amazing products and services on top of that platform.

But rest assured, this is just a blog post about me, Russell and Tom messing about.

There’s a bunch of stuff we’d like to do this year and we figured the best way to do that was to just make them. Or fake them.

In 2011 Tom made The Telepaper, which was an idea we’d had since the beginning of Newspaper Club where somehow you could click a button and it would auto generate a newspaper from your delicious feed, or instapaper or pinboard or somesuch. Specifically the Telepaper was a tool that converts a Readability Reading List into a Newspaper Club newspaper. A demonstration of the Readability and Newspaper Club APIs. You can find it here on Newspaper Club and here on GitHub.

We talk about this a lot, in the cafes of central London, but realised the other day that we all had different perceptions of what such a product looked like. So we went away and made one. Ordered it in the usual way and then sent it to each other.

They were all quite different. Mine was called the Sunday Stellar was based on the idea that you could get a newspaper made from your Stellar. But seeing as we all follow more or less the same people on Stellar I wanted to make it friends of friends on Stellar. So I made a list of all the people we follow on Stellar, deleted the duplicates and then took faves from those friends’ friends.

Mine was a bit fancier with the layout, big pictures, blocks of colour and stuff, but I made it all with Arthr II. No other graphic design software was used.

Russell concentrated on long reads, stuff you might think would work well in print. Interesting stuff that’s hard to read on a screen. This meant he could only get three articles in a 12 page paper. This sort of feels odd, for no particular reason. Does it matter? Are you ordering a paper by the amount of articles? Is three articles enough?

Tom’s was probably closest to what we mean. Good number of articles, stuff we hadn’t read before, some pictures.

All three of these were made using ARTHR II.

This article about the New York newspaper strike was the one I enjoyed reading the most.

We all used different styling, different fonts, different approaches. We can’t really learn anything from any of this, it’s just messing about. There’s nothing wrong or right with any of these approaches, any of these newspapers. It’s just us poking the prototype. Making stuff rather than talking about stuff. Having actual physical things to talk about. We had to make what we were thinking in order to express it.

We enjoyed this. I think we’ll make more of these. We have a few copies left, so if you’d like one send us an email.

And yeah, I know I need to clean my lens. There are more soft focus pictures on Flickr.